Screening Begins At UK’s Gatwick Airport

In a bid to prevent the spread of Ebola to the UK, passengers from affected countries will now be screened at Gatwick Airport, Public Health England (PHE) has announced. Screening has also begun at the Heathrow Airport and is expected to extend to Manchester and Birmingham airports in the coming weeks, a spokesperson for the PHE stated. Passengers from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia will have their temperature taken and fill out a questionnaire with inquiries about their health, recent travel history and whether they might have come in contact with Ebola patients. International tensions about the spread of the disease rose when an infected Liberian, Thomas Duncan flew into the US on September 20 and died in Dallas, Texas. The US has also started screening passengers at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York and 4 other airports are expected to follow suit. Ebola has claimed almost 4500 lives in the current outbreak which has been described as the worst ever recorded.